How effective wallboards can get everyone on the same page

First things first – what is a wallboard?

A wallboard is a tool used to display key business metrics in real-time. Wallboards have evolved over the years from office whiteboards to office monitors that continuously display a business’ data.

Why you should be using a wallboard in your office

The answer is simple. Wallboards can dramatically improve your business. How you ask? Wallboards give businesses a clear view into their KPIs and allow all employees to have a better understanding of performance. Here are 3 reasons why every business should use wallboards to display key metrics:

Transparency

Using wallboards around an office helps promote transparency at all levels of the organization. When employees, management, and executives get a view of the same key metrics, the entire business is able to work and create priorities based around the same targets and goals.

Real-time business decisions

Wallboards let teams monitor and track key business metrics in near real-time. Imagine reacting to a drop in performance or similar urgent issues as soon as they happen, rather than at the end of the month. Your team also saves hours on ad-hoc reporting and meetings to discuss results. Wallboards are transforming how businesses and employees operate day-to-day.

Metrics-driven

Gone are the days where decisions had to be made based on gut feelings.Teams are exposed to real-time data on a daily basis and can see the results of their hard work. Wallboards keep teams focused on key business metrics and help to promote data-driven decision making throughout an entire organization.

Tips for setting up effective wallboards

By this point, it’s easy to see the benefits of using wallboards and to understand how they can transform a business. When looking to build and implement wallboards around an office, there are 3 components that you should keep in mind:

Actionable

When building a wallboard, ask yourself “What am I communicating and what do I expect my teammates to do with it?” The purpose of creating wallboards is to build a dashboard that teams can make decisions from. Your wallboards should display key metrics and targets that are actionable. Ask yourself, “Do these metrics help me make decisions?” or “Are these metrics helping me understand my priorities?” Wallboards should be created to help grow your business and empower your teams with the data they need to make real-time decisions and reach their goals.

Focus on dashboard design

Having a good dashboard layout can completely change the way employees use the data to make decisions. There are 3 guiding principles to good dashboard design:

The information most often checked by users goes in the upper left-hand corner;

Related metrics should be grouped together; and

Metrics that need to be compared should be next to each other.

If you want your wallboards to be effective, remember that less is often more. Having a simple and concise design makes it easy for employees to understand what the data is trying to tell them. Only highlight key metrics that have a real effect on teams and decision making. Just because data is available doesn’t mean it has to be included on a wallboard.

Easy

In order for wallboards to be effective, they should be easy too. Ideally, the wallboard is visible to the entire team from the moment the first employee walks into the office, to the time the last walks out. Depending on a team member to cast the dashboard to a screen creates interruptions and unreliability. Displaying your wallboards with little friction will help make them successful.

What’s the solution? A tool like Airtame can help eliminate these types of barriers. With Airtame, you can set up your wallboard and have it run independently from laptops or team members. The most effective wallboards are the wallboards that are easy to set up and continuously monitor.

Build your own wallboard with Klipfolio and Airtame

Interested in creating and displaying your own wallboards? Klipfolio and Airtame make it easy for you. Just follow these simple steps:

Luke's a talker, writer, and the all-round editor at Airtame Blog. When he is not pwning grammar mistakes, he's collecting records, cooking Mexican food or dreaming about a wireless world – you've got to believe!